“Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty”

By Jeff Pearlman

HarperCollins

$25.95

How ’bout them Cowboys: a bunch of drug-abusing, skirt-chasing party boys who also happened to win three Super Bowls in four years and dominate the NFL during the ’90s. Their resurgence didn’t last, but they sure had a good time while it did.

“Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty” (HarperCollins, $25.95) is Jeff Pearlman’s epic history of the time when the Dallas Cowboys reigned supreme over the NFL landscape (a dark time for this particular Cowboy-hater, but a great time for the fans). Pearlman brings to vivid life the years when Jimmy Johnson played favorites and “motivated” his players with insane practice regimens, Michael Irvin justified his off-the-field antics with a Hall-of-Fame career on it, and the Cowboys won often in spite of their egomaniacal owner Jerry Jones. It’s a fascinating story, one built on the blunder-ridden firing of Cowboys coach (and Texas legend) Tom Landry and a 1-15 season in 1989 that had many longtime fans lose faith in America’s Team. With a wealth of talent, however (including eye-of-the-storm quarterback Troy Aikman), this was a team that couldn’t help but dominate the competition during their peak years of 1992 to 1995.

But karma has a way of catching up with you, and the bad vibes that lay underneath the surface of the dynasty made life difficult for the once-invincible Super Bowl champs. Irvin ended up attacking a teammate and in trouble with the law, Aikman had to contend with unfair charges of racism from Barry Switzer (Johnson’s replacement after he clashed one too many times with Jones), and Deion Sanders made “Prime Time” synonymous with laziness and lack of discipline. As the team slipped out of power, drug abuse and allegations of sexual improprieties caught up with them. Their fall was almost as spectacular as their rise, and the Cowboys haven’t made the playoffs since.

Pearlman’s prose revels in the exploits of the Cowboys (so good at being great on the field, it almost doesn’t matter how bad they were in their private time), from their Super Bowl-sized appetites for the finer things to their equally-sized appetites for loose women (the trashier, the better). This is not so much a book about football as it is about the lifestyles that can come with football success. Some players managed to stay above the fray (Aikman, while not a model of good behavior himself, was disciplined and motivated when it came to winning), but most enjoyed the fame that came with their athletic glory.

The great thing about Pearlman’s book is that he manages to make even the baddest of the bad guys with stars on their helmet sympathetic and human in their Texas-sized problems. He digs deep beneath the championship veneer and gets the real story, warts and all. And while the warts might give comfort to Cowboys-haters the world over (because there is no such thing as a passive response to the team), the story itself makes the dominant team all too human in its glory. You might not like the way that the Dallas Cowboys ruled football for almost a decade, but you have to respect their ability to do so in spite of themselves.